Painting skin tones seems simple, yet is unbelievably complex, like trying to put together a million piece jigsaw puzzle that is almost all one color.

Pale Forest | 22 x 28 | oil on canvas

Fabric inspiration for Pale Forest

Watercolor study for Pale Forest | 9 x 12 | watercolor

I think I was born in the wrong century (and continent). My idea of an artist would be to have been born Louise Elisabeth Vigee LeBrun, French Neoclassical painter and portrait painter to Marie Antoinette. By the time she was in her teens she was painting portraits professionally and exhibiting her works in Salons. She married a wealthy art dealer, had children, and studied painting with the Flemish masters.

After the French Revolution she fled to Italy, Austria and Russia, where she painted nobility and aristicrats, including Catherine the Great’s family. During Napoleon’s reign she returned to France and became a much in demand painter. She finally purchased a home in Louveciennes, Ile-de-France and lived there until she died, leaving a legacy of 660 portraits and 200 landscapes.

Now why can’t I have that life? It’s not too much to ask, is it?

Elisabeth spent her life doing the very same things that I do, mixing paints, standing at a canvas, and painting. I have to think there’s some kind of Jungian collective unconscious at work here, sending her 17th century thoughts and feelings of painting and life into the cosmic universe only to resurrenct into this 21st century artist’s painting life. At least I can hope that it’s so.

The reason I paint is because I can’t not. Painting is not working, it is being me. My mom was an artist, that’s what I am too. The compositions that evolve from places in my mind, supplemented by visual inspirations, and rendered with modern materials, are extensions of a creative consciousness that all of us have, but many cannot express.

Pale Forest is one of those expressions. I’m not sure where she came from or why I chose this particular pose, but I do know she’s a delicate contrast of pale flesh against cool green pattern. She’s looking away and down, into the forest, yet it’s all around her. She has a glow, as if light is shining on and through her. That’s what happned with the paint for the reasons that have to do with what was in my mind and on my brush, at the time I was painting. Sure I use modern technology; photo references, fabric inspiration, modern mediums. Every painter uses what is available at time in they are painting. If Michelangelo had had a computer, who knows…..!

I’d like to believe that Elisabeth must have felt the same sort of thoughts as she painted.

Self Portrait by Elisabeth Louise Vigee LeBrun